Contemplating the contrasts between foreign life and foreign history with
our own one cannot help reflecting upon the yet more startling contrasts of
ancient and modern religion and government. I have wandered not a little
over Europe at irregular intervals for more than fifty years. Always a
devotee to American institutions, I have been strengthened in my beliefs by
what I have encountered.
The mood in our countrymen has been overmuch to belittle things American.
The commercial spirit in the United States, which affects to be
nationalistic, is in reality cosmopolitan. Money being its god, French
money, English money, anything that calls itself money, is wealth to it. It
has no time to waste on theories or to think of generics. "Put money in thy
purse" has become its motto. Money constitutes the reason of its being.
The organic law of the land is Greek to it, as are those laws of God which
obstruct it. It is too busy with its greed and gain to think, or to feel,
on any abstract subject. That which does not appeal to it in the concrete
is of no interest at all.
Just as in the days of Charles V and Philip II, all things yielded to the
theologian's misconception of the spiritual life so in these days of the
Billionaires all things spiritual and abstract yield to what they call the
progress of the universe and the leading of the times. Under their rule we
have had extraordinary movement just as under the lords of the Palatinate
and the Escurial--the medieval union of the devils of bigotry and
power--Europe, which was but another name for Spain, had extraordinary
movement. We know where it ended with Spain. Whither is it leading us? Are
we traveling the same road?
Let us hope not. Let us believe not. Yet, once strolling along through the
crypt of the Church of the Escurial near Madrid, I could not repress the
idea of a personal and physical resemblance between the effigies in marble
and bronze looking down upon me whichever way I turned, to some of our
contemporary public men and seeming to say: "My love to the President when
you see him next," and "Don't forget to remember me kindly, please, to the
chairmen of both your national committees!"